Park Slope Reader

humor

THE MOTHER’S DAY MINDFIELD

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

In my first few years as a mother, I totally fell for the Mother’s Day hype. It’s very name, and the Kay jewelers commercials that run constantly, led one to believe that it’s a day in which those who constantly cater to the needs of others finally have their needs catered to, the one day among the other 364 in which mothers are given their due, honored for the terrific martyrs they are.

Awesome idea. Stellar. Too bad it’s a load of malarkey. I should clarify here that I’m a holiday person. I make homemade costumes for Halloween and throw elaborate themed birthday parties for my kids. I hurtle myself headlong into Christmas, like a moony teenager falling in love for the first time. Once, when my kids and I boarded a bus only to discover the meter was broken and no fare required, I declared it “Free Bus Day” and we sang jubilant songs on the theme, on and off all day.

I like celebrations. And I especially like celebrations in which the person being celebrated is me.

I respect, but do not understood, folks who try to ignore their birthdays, people who forbid their spouses and co-workers to make a big deal. David, my husband, is one such person, and it caused some arguments in our early years together.

[pullquote]

I’VE RECONCILED MYSELF TO THE FACT THAT I WILL NEVER GET A WHOLE DAY OF HUGS AND KISSES AND GRATITUDE.  BUT I CAN GET FIVE TO TEN MINUTES. 

[/pullquote]He has a particularly strong aversion to surprise parties, which I discovered when I threw him one for his twenty-third birthday in our living room. I convinced him to take a nap, and while he was sleeping, I hung streamers, sneaked out the German Chocolate Cake I’d spent two hours baking according to his mother’s recipe, and ushered in the guests. When everything was ready, I woke him from a dead sleep by crying: “The kitchen sink! It’s flooding! Come quick!” Still half asleep, he stumbled into the living room in his boxers and T-shirt and when everyone yelled “Surprise!” he about-faced with nary a word and marched right back into the bedroom.

Looking back, my surprise party plan was not as well-conceived as I’d thought. I nailed the surprise part—the party part, not so much.

Of course, in marriages we give our partners what we want. I have been waiting patiently for several decades for someone to throw me a surprise party—for my birthday, Mother’s Day, International Women’s Day, even Free Bus Day, I’m not picky.

Sometimes, I wonder if maybe David has been planning a surprise party all this time, and he’s just playing a long game, so that I’ll be absolutely flabbergasted when it happens. It’ll be Mother’s Day in my seventy-sixth year of life and David will contrive for me to play mah jong with my girlfriends (by that time, I will have started playing mah jong and calling my ladies “girlfriends”). But when I arrive, instead of being greeted just by Ethel and Martha and Frances (my friends’ names will age along with them), I’ll be greeted by a room packed full of friends, my children, my grandchildren, maybe even the barista of my favorite coffee joint, who’s always thought of me as a mother figure. The mayor might swing by for a minute, say a few words.

There will be not only a chocolate fountain but a prosecco fountain and a marble bust in the exact likeness of me. This will all be possible because one of my three kids will have become a billionaire, having invented the cure for the common cold. After everyone yells “Surprise!” David will turn to face me, leaning on his walker, and he will say: “All these years, you thought we were slacking off, but we were really planning this. Happy Mother’s Day “

And I will finally feel satisfied on Mother’s Day. I will finally feel adequately honored.

It is no surprise that on a recent Mother’s Day, David’s card to me read: “I love you. I hope you have a great day. Just manage your expectations.”

For my part, I think my needs are fairly simple. While I would certainly enjoy a ticker tape parade, I don’t expect one. All I want are heartfelt, homemade cards from each of my children, some kind of dessert with so many calories it’s illegal in some states, and the privilege of choosing the afternoon’s activity.

Of course, I can’t help but hope that, on this one day, my kids will tone down the bickering, or even eliminate it—for one day, how hard is that? I can’t help but dream that they might toss me a moment of gratitude, in the vein of, “Thank you for your joie de vivre and the priceless gift of hope”—that, and maybe pick up their dirty clothes off the bathroom floor.

I always tell my kids that “practice makes perfect—or at least, better” and this is true of Mother’s Day celebrations, as well. Over the past eleven years, David and I have gotten better at hopping around the Mother’s Day minefield, without detonating any explosives.

The primary lesson David had to learn was that it is his job to oversee the children’s card-making. This came as something of a surprise to him. It was a little like watching the sausages get made.

When the kids were in nursery school or Pre K, this was a non-issue because their teachers made the construction of such cards mandatory. Those cards were the best, the Rolls Royce of Mother’s Day cards. Quality materials, like heavy weight card stock and tempera paint, were used. Time was devoted to the enterprise. The cards were both funny and sweet, including phrases like: “Today, I wish for you a donkey!” and “I lov u mame beecaws u ar nis and pretee and giv me candee.”

But when the children were either too young for too old for nursery school, they fell into a dead zone of cardlessness. A two-year-old will not think to make a card for her mother. A six-year-old will think to do it but lack the follow-through to make it happen, hatching extraordinary plans and then getting distracted, permanently, by a stale gummy bear under the couch. Thus, there was one Mother’s Day early on in which I waited and waited for the official Presentation Of the Cards and alas, I waited in vain.

“Why didn’t you have the kids make cards for me?” I asked David.

“That’s their responsibility,” he countered.

Then I let forth a bitter laugh. An “Oh, to be as ignorant as you!” chuckle.

“Why do you think you get Father’s Day cards every year?” I asked. “I stand over them and make sure they do it. And not just a two-second scribble either. I make them go back and revise and give you the good stuff. Acrostics, Haikus. Drawings with verisimilitude.”

So David started overseeing card construction. He doesn’t have the natural ability of a Pre K teacher, and I’ve yet to receive a sonnet, but he gets the job done.

I’ve learned a thing or two myself. I’ve learned to lower my expectations. The lower, the better. If I could bring those expectations to street level, and then pulverize them underfoot, that would be ideal. As it stands, I’ve managed to get them from Sky High to about Fifteen Stories High, which isn’t half bad.

I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that I will never get a whole day of hugs and kisses and gratitude. But I can get five to ten minutes. And the good news is, I don’t just have the chance for these moments on Mother’s Day. Because I’m a mother every day.

Much as I’d like to shout “Action!” and instantly call up Hallmark moments, these moments tend to happen spontaneously, sometimes at the most inconvenient times. I’ve noticed children get very lovey when it’s way past their bedtime or you’re in the middle of talking to someone else about something very important or when you really, really have to go to the bathroom. No matter when they occur, I try to savor the tender moments. I have a whole folder full of heart-melting, no-occasion notes from my kids, as well as drawings of me and them holding hands in a field of flowers and hugging in a room full of cats and smiling while standing next to Frankenstein (mysteriously, I am always wearing a pearl necklace, though I do not own one. Pearl necklace, I’ve learned is the signifier for “Mother”).

That’s to say nothing of the moments we share for which there is no paper trail. The early mornings when my three-year-old clambers into my bed and nuzzles in my shoulder. The bedtimes when my nine-year-old will curl up next to me as I read Little Women aloud. The sporadic, sudden hugs from my eleven-year-old who is so much taller than me that my head nearly rests on his shoulder now.

String these moments together and you get one hell of a Mother’s Day. n

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s, 2014), and the forthcoming chapter book series for kids, The Fix-It Friends (Imprint, 2017).

Playing House

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

For Christmas last year, my daughters got a dollhouse. By New York City standards, it’s really more of a doll mansion than a house. Four stories, massive terrace on the second floor, private garage, and a charming two-person swing hanging from an attached archway. Every time I look at the dollhouse, I imagine what the doll version of our real apartment would be, an exercise that only depresses and demoralizes me. No parent would buy that doll-apartment—except maybe for New York City parents, because, after all, it would be a space-saver.

My girls love their dollhouse. I love their dollhouse. It fulfills my real estate dreams and allows me to realize my housekeeping aspirations. Because while I don’t have a shot in hell at keeping my real house tidy, I keep an immaculate dollhouse. 

My three children are humans (as far as I know) but their effect on our home is not like that of humans. It is like that of weather. Bad weather. Ruinous weather. Hurricanes. Tornadoes.

The eye of the storm is my three year-old, Terza. Her messes are not just epic, but Homeric. I’d be impressed by their breadth and ambition, if I wasn’t so busy having a nervous breakdown.

Terza is an upender. Before selecting a pair of socks, she needs to upend the entire bin and ponder all of her choices spread out before her. Ditto with the underwear and the pants and the shirts—and the toys. She upends packs of crayons, containers full of ponies, tubs of beads, packs of cards, boxes of blocks. Apparently, it takes so much energy to upend everything that there’s none left to put it all away. I try to get her to clean up, I really do. But being a savvy third child, she knows that more often than not, if she stalls long enough, we’ll eventually have to rush off to pick up or drop off a sibling, and by the time we get home, it’ll be past her bedtime and I’ll be so fried and ready for all three-year-olds to be asleep, that I’ll “put a pin” in her mess which is to say, send her to bed and clean it up myself.

[pullquote]Every night, the dollhouse looks as if it has been ransacked by a gang of thugs or has just hosted five simultaneous frat parties.[/pullquote]

The older kids—my daughter, eight and son, ten—no longer create state-of-emergency messes.  With the big kids, the mess is less a downpour and more a steady, unrelenting drizzle. They move through the place, constantly dropping personal belongings everywhere, like Hansel with his breadcrumbs—only for no good reason. Hairbrushes, socks, markers, books, headbands, and always, everywhere, endless pieces of paper. I’m surprised they have time to get anything else done, so busy are they picking up items and depositing them in a new location.

I’m surprised I have time to get anything done, so busy am I nagging them constantly to “Put this back where you found it!” and “Put your dirty clothes in the hamper!” and “Put these clothes back in your drawer and don’t you dare put them in the hamper because you wore them for five minutes and they are about as dirty as a Mister Rogers episode!”

On bad days—snow days, or worse, playdate days —it takes hours to wrestle our house into order again. Even on our best days, it takes a full hour– and even then, it’s not clean enough that I’d invite Child Protective Services—or my mother—over. I can never get our house clean. The most I can hope for is that it appears habitable.

But it takes mere minutes to make the dollhouse immaculate—no matter how anarchic the mess. And it does get anarchic in there.

When my girls play in the dollhouse, their dramas are not your usual “family” fare.  More often than not, they play with animals, many of which are feral. This results in much stampeding and charging and attacking—which wreaks havoc on a domicile. Even when they play with people, their dramas are tragedies of a very physical nature. Doctors are constantly being sent for because characters are inevitably wounded, sometimes fatally. There is also quite a lot of dancing that goes on in the dollhouse—dancing which brings the roof down, literally.

Every night, the dollhouse looks as if it has been ransacked by a gang of thugs or has just hosted five simultaneous frat parties. The furniture isn’t just overturned; it’s overturned in the wrong room. The fridge is in the master bedroom, the bunk beds are in the kitchen, the sofa’s on the terrace. Most disquieting of all, the charming two-person swing is off its hinge and lying on its side a few feet away.

So, every night, I groan and sigh and shake my head. And then, ignoring the mess in my actual home, I kneel down and set about tidying up the dollhouse. I don’t have to clean the dollhouse, but I want to. It calms me the way a glass of wine or evening yoga might calm a less crazy person.

Cleaning the dollhouse takes about three minutes. I return the master bed to the master bedroom, the fridge to the kitchen, the sofa to the living room. I hang the charming two-person swing on the charming archway created for this express purpose. The dollhouse is not just habitable. It is flawless—ready for its flawless family to move in.

I place the dollhouse Mom on the sofa, the dollhouse Dad in the armchair and the dollhouse child in her bed. Sure, it’d be fun to give her a push in the now-functional swing but it’s night and at night—in the dollhouse at least—children sleep. They do not run into the living room at 3 a.m., demanding marshmallows and begging to watch Mickey Mouse.

Cleaning up my dollhouse reminds me of how well I used to parent, before I had kids. I was the absolute best mother when my kids were just figments of my imagination. I was patient and consistent. Fun but firm. I knew the answer to every question and exactly what to do in every situation. When I was a parent only in my day dreams, I never yelled, never caved, never doubted myself.

My imaginary children were paragons of obedience and self-regulation—they always cleaned up after themselves. They never bickered or whined or raised their voices. They watched absolutely no TV and ate absolutely all their vegetables. They always minded their manners and never minded sharing. They did everything I told them to, just like the dolls in the dollhouse.

Of course, my imaginary kids never surprised me. They never caused me to snort with laughter. They never made me feel like I was having a cardiac episode from such intense feeling—joy and terror and gratitude and wonder, all at the same time.

I remind myself of this as I turn my attention from the perfectly-ordered dollhouse to my real living room. I remind myself as I sweep up crushed Cheerios and load the dishwasher. I remind myself as I put dirty shirts in the hamper and fish out clean ones that somehow found their way in there.

I think about how it’s good to have a dollhouse to dream in and a real house to live in. A person needs both.

 

 

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press, 2014) and the forthcoming series for children, The Fix-It Friends, out in early 2017 from Macmillan Kids. 

Picture Book Pitfalls

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , ,

Does this scene seem familiar? You’re curled up in bed or snuggled in a rocking chair or sitting on your stoop on a beautiful fall afternoon and you’re reading Bread and Jam for Frances to your child. You are feeling incredibly good about yourself because you know that reading builds a lifelong love of literature and ensures that your child will be adequately attached to you so that they won’t get strung out on heroin or drop out of high school or get ill-advised tats on their ankles.

Your child is leaning against you and it’s wonderful to smell that good, clean kid smell and also wonderful to know you are the best parent that ever existed, so exceptional you may, in fact, win Mother of the Year. Because you could have opted for a shorter book, maybe Sendak or Willems, which would have left you a few minutes to send emails, but you opted for this one because, well, they just grow up so fast.

You are admiring Hoban’s writing style—so simple, yet so satisfying, the literary equivalent of comfort food—and you are feeling delightfully charmed by Frances, who is not only the only badger you’ve ever encountered in children’s literature, but also the best. And then it happens.

Frances sings.

Of course she does. That badger will sing about anything. She will sing about eggs and tea sets and jump rope. Yes, it’s a part of her precocious appeal and yes, the songs are great—funny and smart and pithy. A part of you wishes Taylor Swift would release an album of Frances covers. But the fact remains that they put an undue onus on you, beleaguered mother, who did not get formal songwriting training at Julliard.

There you are, reading happily, until you crash right into those block quotes which instantly kill your buzz and trigger the following inner monologue:

Oh, come on. A song? Really. Now? Did the Hobans bother to give me a clue as to a melody that might work here? Did he insert a helpful footnote, clarifying that if you’ll just sing to the tune of “Oh Susanna,” you’ll be on cruise control? Something like:

“Why are there so many

Songs inside picture books?”*

*sing to the tune of “Rainbow Connection”

No, of course they did not.

I could speak the lyrics, as if it were a poem. That’s perfectly legit. We move the plot forward, we get character development, and without the stress of composing an original soundtrack. Still, I can’t help feeling like I’m giving everyone short shrift here. How hard is it, anyway, to sing a jaunty little tune? It’s not rocket science.

I’ll just pick a very basic melody; say, “The ABCs” or “Row Your Boat.” We’ll give that a shot.

And look at that, it’s a disaster because I’m not a direct descendant of Pete Seeger, and thus, it’s not that easy for me to match Frances’ lyrics about soft-boiled eggs to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It would be easier, really, just to improvise a new melody. You know, like the jazz giants did. Like Coltrane.

It seems like it would be easier, and yet it is not. Because as soon as I’ve sung one line of Francis’ incisive lyrics, I forget the melody I just came up with. You could call it “avant-guard,” if by that you meant “unbearable.”

So, I’ve exhausted all options, which means the only choice now is to imagine WWNNPD—what would non-neurotic people do? They would say: Who cares? It’s not like my daughter will notice. She probably thinks I sound like an angel and am beautiful too, because she is young and innocent in the ways of the world. And I get an A for effort, which still puts me in the running for the Mother of the Year, which, despite the fact that it is a fictional prize I know does not exist, I still have my heart set on. Not quite what non-neurotic people would do, but as close as I can get.

Repeat this monologue at every new mention of a song in a picture book. You get the idea. It’s draining.

It’s not the most pressing problem to plague families today, I’ll admit. Yet you’d think there’d be a hack for this. Or, better yet, an app. Yes, what we really need is an app in which you can search for picture books featuring un-scored lyrics, and then play an original composition for each tune, courtesy of some actual Julliard grad who, no doubt, could use the work.

Anyone?

Nicole Caccavo Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s), now available in paperback. Her children’s series, The Fix-It Friends, comes out in 2017 by Macmillan Kids – and will not feature any original songs.

About Lucy

By Filed Under: Hypocrite's Almanac Tagged With: , , ,

Dear Hypocrite,

I love your column. Often when I’m facing a problem that I’m not sure how to handle, I’ll think about what you’d say and I follow your imagined advice. This time, however, I can write in and wait for your real response! My husband and I are struggling with this one. We’re hoping you can help us out.

My husband has a group of good friends from college. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know them and their wives and consider them my pals, too. We’ve gone on many trips together as couples, and now that our kids have finally made it to a good traveling age, we’ve started to take family vacations together. Last year we rented a house in Mexico and it was a success for the most part. The only issue is with “Lucy,” one of “Ann and Tom’s” children. My husband and I are not sure what’s wrong with Lucy. She talks constantly and is forever trying to enlist the entire group in playing a game. Ann and Tom encourage the behavior by playing her games which involve making animal sounds and answering senseless riddles. She’s forever hijacking conversations and telling stories that have no point. Her parents make no effort to curb her. She sabotages whatever is going on. Lucy is eight and already the last person I’d want to sit next to at a dinner party.

At the end of the Summer, all the families are meeting at a house in Michigan for ten days. The house is not as big as we wanted. Some of the couples have to sleep in twin beds, some are on a sleeping porch. There isn’t a lot of privacy. My husband and I are dreading being cooped up with Lucy. My husband wants to tell Ann and Tom that we’re reconsidering the trip because we’re not sure if we can tolerate Lucy’s behavior. I agree something needs to be said, but that seems too strong. How do we ask them to rein her in so we can catch up like old days?

Signed
What To Do About Problem Child

Art by Jennifer Gibson
Art by Jennifer Gibson

Dear What To Do,

First of all, there are no more old days. Kids change absolutely every dynamic they touch. Trying to get back to the energy of the old days is as fruitless as flossing your teeth with one hand. You won’t be able to do it. Let go of that fantasy now.

I hear you when you say you want to catch up, though. Being able to share your lives with people who’ve known you in your wilder days is the absolute best. The thing you need to figure out now is how not to fuck that up. And you, What To Do, are at the precipice of ruining everything. There are a couple of reasons why I’m going to tell you to do absolutely nothing in your struggle with Problem Child.

When I was twelve I was pretty sure I was done with the human species. I’d been betrayed by my friends and wasn’t feeling so great about my family. But there was one thing I had a lot of faith in. Squirrels. My backyard was filled with them. Every afternoon after school, I would sit on the steps going down to the yard and watch them gather chestnuts for hours. Every couple minutes or so, I would sneak a few inches closer to them, determined to be their Jane Goodall. I’d heard of some people who had squirrels at pets. I wanted squirrels as friends.

I wasn’t successful at forging the species divide. I was never able to hand them a chunk of Lender’s bagel like I wanted. After about three months, I turned my back on the squirrels and got on my bike. Within a few weeks I ended up getting a new pack of human friends who let me get close to them. The squirrel thing was a phase—one of a hundred or so I have gone through. Kids go through phases constantly. You last saw Lucy a year ago. I bet you $23 that the kid has moved on to another more or less annoying phase. You need to see where she is before you say anything to the parents about curbing her behavior.

There’s another even more important reason you shouldn’t say anything before the trip.

When kids are young, they are their parent’s possessions. Parents are hard at work guiding and shaping them. They do their best to create their child’s afterschool and summer schedules and encourage friendships for them that are morally sound and emotionally supportive. This is why parents can’t help but feel personally attacked when someone talks shit about their kid. Saying something bad about Lucy is the same as telling Ann and Tom that they are shitty parents. You say, “Lucy is hard to take,” they hear, “You have created a monster.”

You have two choices: You can sit this trip out or you can go. If you go, I think you will discover a different Lucy. But if Lucy is how you last left her, you’re allowed to drop a well-constructed, well-timed comment to her parents that may help the situation. Here are my suggestions.

“It’s so good to see you. Sometimes it’s so hard with all the kids around to get a word in edgewise. Want to sneak in a walk and talk?”

“What do you guys think of using a local sitter for the night? Catching up is hard at dinner with all the kids. I want to know how you guys are doing.”
“Lucy has so much energy!”

All of these statements can start conversations. The last one will work only if said without judgment. Say it like you’d say “Seven times seven equals forty-nine” or “Cows give milk you can drink.”

Good luck with this. I feel for you. But I also feel for Lucy. I wasn’t a fan of grownups when I was young because they were always telling me to be quiet so they could talk. Sitting there and watching them talk was excruciating. How could they be so boring? Would it really hurt them to play a game during dinner once in while?
See you next time!

Dispatches From Babyville: Baby Steps

By Leave a Comment Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , ,

The morning after Lorenzo was born, I was lying in my hospital bed, cradling the baby in my arms and gazing at his sleeping face when he suddenly started to choke. On thin air. He hadn’t been nursing or anything, he just went from slumbering in that unreachable, newborn way to gagging.

I lay immobilized for a second or two and then I raced into the hospital hallway, holding Lorenzo and yelling: “Help me! Someone! My baby is choking!”

I was fully aware of how ridiculous this sounded and what a spectacle I was making but my panic overrode any sense of decorum. This was life and death.

A middle-aged nurse strode over. She was solid in her scrubs, and she walked like she meant business. Within a few seconds, she’d grabbed the baby out of my arms like a sack of beans and whacked him on the back, twice, with what seemed like excessive force. I winced as I imagined his spinal column shattering. But he remained in one piece, as erect as a newborn can be, and his gagging was replaced with bawling.

“That’s normal,” the nurse explained, handing the baby back to me and paying precious little attention, I noted, to supporting his head. “He’s just gagging on his amniotic fluid. They do that sometimes.”

She said it casually, like it was supposed to make me feel better. In fact, it had the opposite effect. I’d been prepared to protect my son from all sorts of choking hazards—loose change, hot dogs, paper clips—but later, in a few months, when I’d had a chance to hone my mothering skills. I’d never thought I‘d need to start now, right out of the gate, and that I’d have to also worry about him choking on stuff that was already inside of him. The very stuff that had shielded him from harm for the past nine months.

All of a sudden, the enormity of the enterprise before me slammed down on my shoulders. Holy Mother of God. There’d be things I would fail to protect him from. And not just the stuff I’d already, very diligently, worried about like clipping off his fingertips instead of his fingernails because I couldn’t see details that small. There was a whole world, a whole galaxy, of other stuff that I couldn’t protect him from, stuff that hadn’t even occurred to me, stuff I didn’t even know about. What the hell was I going to do now?

What I was going to do was hang my head and cry, the which I did right there in the hospital hallway, in my no-slip socks and pink polka-dot pajamas.

“You mean he’s going to do it again?” I sobbed, “and there’s nothing I can do to stop it?”

Without missing a beat, the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and ushered me back to my bed. She seemed so unfazed by my sudden crying fit, it gave me the strong suspicion that that hallway had seen far worse mental breakdowns. Working in maternity was probably pretty similar to working in the psych ward, except with bigger maxi pads.

“It’s going to be all right,” she promised, “A little gagging won’t hurt him.”

“But what if—” I sputtered. “What if he chokes so much he can’t breathe?”

“He won’t,” she replied. “I’ve never heard of that.”

That wasn’t sufficient reassurance for me. There was all sorts of shit you never heard about until it happened to you and then it was too late. I’d never heard about retinitis pigmentosa and yet, here I was, unable to see the tissue she was holding out to me until she finally shoved it right in my hand.

I blew my nose and took a deep breath.  Too late to back out now.

“Tell me what to do, exactly, if it happens again,” I pleaded, “Step by step.”

“There’s only one step,” she replied, “Just give him a good old whack on his back.”

“But how will I know for sure that his airway is clear?” I pressed.

The nurse looked over in the direction of my roommate who was buzzing her call button insistently from behind the room’s dividing curtain. I’d been privy to my roommate’s every sound for the last twelve hours and despite the fact that I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her, I’d put together a pretty detailed profile: Polish, first baby, C-section, not much luck nursing, prone to sudden meltdowns herself. From the sound of the call button, there was another breakdown in the works, which meant mine had to be wrapped up.

“Look,” said the nurse, “if the baby’s crying, you know he’s not choking. So I guess if you really wanted to be sure his airway was clear, make him cry. Give his big toe a good squeeze—that’ll aggravate him.”

“OK,” I affirmed, “Got it.” If I have any suspicions that the baby is choking, any at all, I should make him cry.

Which is why I spent the first month of my infant’s life annoying him relentlessly.

I’d look over at the bouncy seat, where Lorenzo lay still, silent, and peaceful. Though this is most mothers’ dream, it was my call–to-arms. Why was the baby so preternaturally still? Clearly, he was not breathing. Likely, it was that damn amniotic fluid causing trouble again. Who knew how long he’d been like this? As I sat pondering, his brain might be losing oxygen! No time to undertake the subtle investigative measures I’d learned in infant CPR class like watching his chest rise and fall; I couldn’t trust myself to see the ever-so-slight movement of his chest anyway, my vision was so poor. No, no, this emergency called for the squeeze-the-toe test, approved by medical professionals as the quickest, most effective way to confirm baby’s respiratory health.

I’d squeeze the toe. He’d scrunch his placid face into a scowl and commence caterwauling. Mission accomplished. The baby was breathing. And, now royally pissed off.

Over and over again in the first weeks of my baby’s life, people were assuring me that if I trusted my mother’s instinct, I’d be fine and over and over again, I was finding that was a load of horse-crap. Maybe other mothers, ones with all their primary senses intact, had functional maternal instincts, but worry and a severe lack of confidence had caused mine to short-circuit. None of this mothering business was coming naturally. I needed a detailed instruction manual to do everything and sometimes, even that didn’t work. It was a classic case of the blind leading the blind.

From Now I See You by Nicole C. Kear. Copyright © 2014 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Nicole C. Kear’s memoir, Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press): Order now the book and find more info at nicolekear.com.